Countries of OAWorld: an update and question

When I announced the subject supplement to Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015, I said this:

As for the second supplement, The Countries of OAWorld 2011-2015? Despite the tumbleweeds that have so far greeted my request for feedback on interest in this book, I may still do it–but it’s going to take a while longer than the first supplement did.

For one thing, I plan to write a non-OA issue of Cites & Insights (possibly trying to use Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking for parts of it, since my hand still isn’t back to normal).

For another, it’s a bigger effort–either 54 or 69 country chapters (depending on whether I use 25 journals or ten as the lower limit for full chapters), plus six chapters with brief coverage for other countries in each region (Pacific/English doesn’t have any other countries). Even with some trimming to make chapters shorter, it’s likely to be a much larger book.

Best guess? Some time in July or August.

It’s time for an update…

Yes, I’m planning to do it

I tried a couple of chapters to see how they’d go, and I think the country chapters tell interesting stories–even though, at this point, readers will pretty much write their own narrative.

To wit:

It looks as though there will actually be 83 chapters so there’s some context–an OAWorld overview, seven region overviews, 69 country chapters, and six “other countries in region” chapters.

So I had to make the chapters more compact than the seven pages of region chapters in GOAJ. After some experimenting, I arrived at this:

I’ve combined the first two tables (journals & articles), combined APC levels & revenues, simplified growth & shrinkage, and made the two graphs smaller vertically (and moved the legend to the side from the bottom to keep proportions reasonable).

All of the subheadings are now Heading 3 rather than Heading 2, which saves a lot of space.

I’ve eliminated captions, since they’re pretty much redundant.

The net result: the standard region or country chapter is now four pages long (“other countries in region” chapters might be a page or two longer), as long as I don’t add much commentary.

Trying out a couple of countries, I find that the compact form doesn’t require much textual commentary–zero to two lines is usually enough.

The result should be a big but manageable book, somewhere around 340-350 pages.

The sample chapters are what uncovered the label problem with growth & shrinkage tables, since these were now small enough groups (in the first country tested, Nigeria) to allow direct manual checking. (And the small groups also have wider variations, of course.)

I’m interleaving Cites & Insights and the new supplement…

Given that nobody has yet expressed interest in the new supplement, I was going to set it aside until the probably-small July C&I was done…but the country chapters turn out to be fast & interesting, so much so that I keep returning to them. So I’m working on both.

Haven’t started using NaturallySpeaking “for real” yet; someday soon…but, unfortunately, even with six-fingered typing it’s more natural for me to type what I have to say than it is to say it…

Right now (in a day that’s generally gone south), I’m probably about halfway through the C&I draft, and have done 14 chapters of the book, with the fifteenth just needing “bookification” (I’ve done and checked the template-driven tables and figures and copied them to a separate country page; just have to move them into Word).

Best bet…

Some time in July, depending in part on how many other crises arise.

And the question (if anybody cares)…

I have a new third-order measure, but I’m not sure whether it’s explainable or useful, or how to describe it.

Here’s how it works–I’ll use one Asian nation as an example:

I take the percentages of journals that either grew or shrank by 25% or more between 2014 and 2015, separating delisted journals (Gray OA) and those still in DOAJ. For India, those figures are:
Gray OA: Up 19.0%, Down 44.8%
DOAJ16: Up 23.8%, Down 37.2%

I take the up/down ratio for each side: Gray 0.42, DOAJ 0.64

I divide the DOAJ16 ratio by the Gray OA ratio: 1.5

That’s the measure. In short, Indian journals still in DOAJ are 50% more likely to have grown significantly rather than shrunk significantly, as compared to delisted/gray OA journals.

(Choosing a different Asian country, the up/down ratios are 2.89 and 2.00–journals are much more likely to be growing–but the ratio’s 0.7.)

So the multipart question is:

Is this a meaningful metric?

If so, how can I describe it in a few words, augmented by an explanation in the preface?

At this point, “damfino” is the best I can do on both.

If there are no responses, I’ll eliminate the metric. (It would appear as text, not as a table.)

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